In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Edson Prestes, Professor at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and an organizer of the Humanitarian Robotics and Automation Technology Challenge (HRATC) 2016 competition. The HRATC competition challenges teams around the world to develop methods of controlling robots to detect land mines in large open environments.

If you have a soft spot for robotics, this competition is right up your alley. With separate tracks for academic researchers, college students, and high school students, the 2016 Soft Robotics Competition offers anyone with an interest in robotics the chance to design and build their own soft robot using the resources available in the open-source Soft Robotics Toolkit.

The Airbus Shopfloor Challenge invites robotics teams from around the world to create innovative robotic solutions for a real-life manufacturing challenge, and compete live at the IEEE 2016 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 15-21 May 2016 in Stockholm, Sweden. Deadline to apply is March 15, 2016.

At a keynote address this week during the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of XPRIZE, announced the launch of the $7M Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, a three-year global competition challenging teams to advance ocean technologies for rapid and unmanned ocean exploration.

Coming to life in the 1970s with then-instructor Professor Emeritus Woodie Flowers at the lead, 2.007 was at the forefront of a revolution in engineering education, becoming one of the first hands-on classes to teach students not only how to design an object but also how to build it. Today, it’s a fun celebration of making that ends in an annual head-to-head robot competition on MechE’s Innovation Day in May.

Launched in the summer of 2015, the Challenge was created to highlight the amazing work being done by the research and education community with the Baxter robot. With more than 90 total entries from 19 countries around the globe, the Humans to Robots Lab at Brown University was a standout in the criteria of relevancy, innovation and breadth of impact.

The Robot Race to Hawaii is a robotics contest where participants program a humanoid Nao robot to run a 10-meter race in the shortest time possible. The whole competition is run in a Webots simulation inside The Construct hosting platform. Participants need only a computer equipped with web browser to participate, and are not required to download any applications. There is no cost to enter.

In 21 countries across the globe, hundreds of people are preparing for Cybathlon 2016, where cutting edge robotic assistive technologies will help people with disabilities to compete in a series of races. This summer the Cybathlon practice session took place at the Swiss Arena in Kloten so that the teams could test out the courses. Watch the trailer for the rehearsal games!

Here’s an interesting robotics challenge – a coalition of blueberry farmers are offering a $250,000 prize for automation solutions that improve blueberry picking. The deadline for entries in the competition has been extended to December 4, 2015. Apparently farmers can’t keep up with the record high demand for blueberries.

Submit your video to the AAAI Video Competition for a chance to win one of the several Shakey Awards. We’ll be voting for the People’s Choice Award right here on Robohub. Last year’s videos were viewed over 1 million times!

Inspired by the 2011 Fukushima accident, the euRathlon competition is the first outdoor competition where teams of land, sea and air robots must cooperate in a realistic disaster-response scenario. Following participation in the trials and sub-challenges, six multi-domain teams attempted the Grand Challenge, where they were required to locate missing workers, map a building and identify critical hazards, and inspect land and underwater pipes and stem a leak, all within 100 minutes. Watch the Grand Challenge video recaps and find out the winning teams …

The first day of euRathlon 2015 two-domain sub-challenges started with the land and air (L+A) combined scenario, followed in the afternoon by the sea and land (S+L), where robots had to search for missing workers and leaks, inspect the building and close valves on land and underwater. Only ten teams passed to this second round of the competition, creating a total of 6 multi-domain teams — find out the winners of these trials and watch the video recap …